


Can't Wash the Echoes Out

by language_escapes



Series: Chosen and Defined 'Verse [23]
Category: St Trinian's, St Trinian's (2007 2009)
Genre: Backstory, Class Issues, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 02:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These girls know <i>nothing</i> about her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Wash the Echoes Out

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd, un-Britpicked.
> 
> Title from Florence and the Machine's "Drumming Song".
> 
> Miss Dickinson has always fascinated me as a character, given that despite the fact that she appears to be a milquetoast, she's the English teacher that actually lasts, and she seems to understand her students better than one might expect. She deserved to have her story told. I hope other people write their versions someday.

They don’t know anything about her, these girls. They are needlessly cruel, they mock her and her interests, they are lazy, they seem to scorn intelligence, and they call her _soft_ , _weak_ , they call her a failure, they count down the days until she leaves, until they scare her away.

But Elise Dickinson is not weak, she is not soft, and these girls know _nothing_ about her.

She grows up in council housing, the second child of a miner father and a vague, distracted mother. Her mother doesn’t work, can’t work, walks with a limp ever since her accident in the factory; her father is in South Wales most of the year, digging coal and dying slowly. He finally passes, emphysema, when she is fourteen. 

They never have much money, and Elise learns how to scrounge early on. She has thin, agile fingers and a fondness for breaking and entering. She gets by, is the point. She makes do. Her home is a bleak place, and she doesn’t spend much time there. She likes school, and she likes her friends, and that is about it.

Her friends are gang members and hookers, thieves and drug dealers. They are a better family than the one she has. They look after her, and she looks after them. She spends most of her teen years crashed out on someone’s sofa, book in one hand, cigarette in the other. 

They talk about their dreams, what they will do once they graduate, and they all know that is all it is- dreams. None of them are getting out. They are the sons and daughters of miners and construction workers. They themselves work in factories and diners, starting young, helping support their families. This is their future, no matter what they want. They drink and they party and try to forget it all. She doesn’t, though. Maybe her friends can bury their dreams, but she never could.

Elise marries when she is eighteen, to the father of her child. She loses the child, but the marriage remains, though she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t think she ever did. She works as a waitress for years, reading Dickens and Austen on her breaks, tattered old books she’s gotten from rubbish bins. She saves every pound, returning home to a rundown flat and an unemployed husband, and keeps on dreaming of doing something she really loves. 

When she is twenty, her husband leaves her for a younger woman (younger, younger, how do you get much younger than twenty, when did twenty become _old_ , and she may not have loved him, but he was her husband, and he was supposed to be there for her, he was supposed to honor her, and he didn’t even talk to her, just left a note on the refrigerator saying he’d send over the divorce papers later). She loses the flat, moves back home with her mother, who just shakes her head and sighs.

And Elise just lifts her chin up and keeps saving. She slips a smile on her face each morning and serves cranky and nasty customers, slipping away from the handsy ones, never letting anyone know that she is going to get out.

She is going to get out.

Her hands shake when she gets home each night, exhaustion catching up to her, but she still pulls out her copies of Bronte, of Joyce, of the Greek classics and reads until her eyes can’t stay open anymore. She counts her pennies. She counts the seconds.

Her mother gets sick. Her mother has cancer. Elise does her best, she does, but she can’t afford all the bills and all the medicine, and despite her efforts, her mother dies. Elise is twenty-two. She is twenty-two and a divorcee, a motherless child, and poor, so poor, getting nowhere fast.

(But she adapts, of course she does. What else can she do?)

There aren’t many options for her, not really. With her money gone into the ground with her mother, her dreams have disappeared. She looks at her childhood friends working their dead-end jobs (and the dead-end is literal, she remembers her father, she remembers her mother’s limp) and realizes the truth of her situation, of her life. She needs money fast to cover her bills. So she makes a decision. She knows some people, and they remember her, and they toss her a few jobs here and there. She picks a lock and picks a pocket. She picks clubs, she picks johns, she picks up the pieces of her life.

She’s the thief that reads Thackeray, the whore who reads Homer. She’s a stereotype; she defies stereotypes. Elise doesn’t quite know who she is anymore, but she’s been reassured that no one does when they’re twenty-three.

“I’m going to get out,” she tells Kim. Kim works at the strip club, and they share a flat. They’ve known each other since they were eight. Kim has two kids that live with her mother, since she doesn’t have the money to give them a real life. She’s doing this to get them into a good school, maybe get enough money to live with them again, to take care of them again. She’s doing her best. Her best is not enough.

“Sure, honey,” Kim says tiredly, carefully applying her makeup. “We all are.”

And of course, they’re _not_ , and Elise knows this, but she’s not going to give up until she can stop taking her clothes off, until she stops laying down to do her job. Elise doesn’t think of England; Elise thinks of Woolf and Shelley and Proust. She thinks of books and desks and chalkboards. She holds her eyes shut, she holds her breath, and she holds on to her dreams.

She thinks of applying for scholarships, but she doesn’t know what to write in the essays.

“Mum, I think… I’ve ruined my life, Mum,” she says to the gravestone. She has a bottle of Jack in her hand, and she doesn’t like to drink, she really doesn’t, it reminds her of her father, but sometimes it’s the only thing that gets her through a day, the only thing that makes the horror show of her life bearable. She wishes her mother were with her, if only to shake her head and sigh, if only to agree with her.

“You could always go back to waitressing,” Kim says one night, her hands shaking. Elise holds Kim’s head in her lap, trying to keep her steady, to get her through the shakes. Kim isn’t the first person she’s gotten through withdrawal, and Elise doubts she’ll be the last. 

“It doesn’t pay as well,” Elise says. She reaches down and brushes a few sweaty strands out of Kim’s face. Kim whimpers and twists, burying her face in Elise’s knee. 

“Don’t think the pay matters, really,” she says finally, her voice hoarse. She reaches up and places her sweaty, shaking hand on Elise’s face. Her eyes are dark and sad, so sad, and Elise thinks that all she sees are sad eyes these days. “Baby, don’t let this be you.”

She wants to say it won’t be, but the bottles of Jack are beginning to pile up in the corner, and one addiction isn’t the same as another, but they’re close enough.

“It won’t,” she says, and it isn’t a statement but a promise.

She stops stripping and puts on cardigans and tweed. She goes back to being a waitress and puts on a large smile and a patient attitude. The pay is worse, but it’s better than the alternative. Kim goes to rehab. Elise manages to get a job with a small bookstore, and she relishes spending her days with books. She finally gives in and dons the glasses she’s needed for years. When she looks in the mirror, she no longer sees the twenty-two year old stripper. She sees a teacher. She knows what she wants to do.

She saves her money, and she sees the light at the end of the tunnel. She is twenty-five, and maybe sometime soon she can start to live her life on her terms.

“Baby,” Kim says, her bare foot on Elise’s leg, “You’ve always lived life on your own terms.”

Elise shakes her head. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

Kim smiles at her and brushes a kiss on her forehead as she stands up and walks off to her bedroom. She’s rail thin these days, but she’s clean, and she sees her kids every weekend. Her mother is even talking about letting her come home.

Elise applies to University. She gets accepted. It isn’t a great school, it isn’t Oxford or Cambridge, but she’ll get a degree, she’ll be a teacher. 

“Come with me,” Elise begs Kim, but Kim shakes her head.

“University isn’t where I belong, honey, you know that.”

“Just stay with me. You’re my best friend,” she pleads.

“You’re mine. But I need to stay close to my kids.”

Elise goes. She learns, she works, she works on her Bachelor in Education; she wants to help people like her, she wants people to realize they don’t have to sink their dreams because they’re pregnant or poor or just lacking in opportunities. If she can keep just one girl off the streets, she’ll have done her job, she thinks. She’ll be satisfied.

She gets her degree. She’s almost thirty. Twelve years after she got married, after she got pregnant, after she lost her baby, and she has a degree. She and Kim celebrate by watching movies. Kim is four years clean and living with her mother and kids. Elise has a degree. They’re living life on their own terms.

Elise starts teaching at a public school. It’s a good school, and she likes it. The students are bright, and sweet, and very, very posh. Her cardigans and tweed fit in perfectly, her smile is bright, her patience never ending. She’s somewhat bored.

“You should send your eldest to my school,” Elise says to Kim over the phone.

“I have another school in mind for Jemima, actually,” Kim says. She sounds distracted, but then, she’s at work and probably shouldn’t be on the phone. She’s an administrative assistant of some sort. It’s still working class, not a job that will ever make her rich, but at least she won’t wind up with a limp or ruined lungs, like their parents before them.

“Oh?” Elise asks, looking back down at the papers she’s grading.

“Yeah,” Kim replies. “St. Trinian’s. Sounds like it might be right for her.”

Elise pauses in marking her papers. A seed is planted.

That was two years ago, and now Elise stands before these St. Trinian’s girls, imagining herself among them- because there is too much of her that would fit right in- and imagining Kim’s daughter Jemima there, and for a moment she feels like she never dug herself out of that hole she made in the first place. She stammers and trips over her words, her hands shake, but she lifts her chin and keeps going.

They think she’s weak. That she’ll fail. That if they push hard enough, dig into her with their fingernails outstretched, she’ll break. She’ll disappear just like the four English teachers before her. As if she hadn’t lived in slums for two years, as if she hadn’t lost a baby, as if she hadn’t had to beg, steal, and sleep her way into survival for _three fucking years_ and how _dare_ they, how dare they dismiss her, how dare they look at her and decide that she really _is_ a fluttering, nervous mess. 

Elise Dickinson lives life on her own goddamn terms. And she will teach these girls something if it kills her. She got out. By God if she’s going to leave these girls behind.

She adjusts her lessons, finding new ways to attract the girls to books. She has them read DH Lawrence, _The Awakening_ , Woolf and Bronte and too many poets to even name. She forces them to act out scenes from the books. She makes them rewrite parts. She puts them in the story. She can’t get them all, but she can get a few, and she sees a few eyes start to stare at their books, feels some others stare at her. She can feel the school killing her, trying to drag her back to what she was (there is too much alcohol everywhere, and she may have stopped herself once, but the temptation is still there; it would be so easy to stop caring, here, in the school where no one cares while simultaneously caring too much, a paradox; she sees girls fail to pick a pocket cleanly, and she wants to give them pointers, but no), but she’ll give them a year. Try to teach them something, even if it’s only _you have options beyond the obvious; you can have more than what you’ve been told_.

Taylor tries to ignore her, but Elise can see her sneaking glances into their copy of _Don Quixote_. Emily Toshiba finds _War and Peace_ fascinating, which Elise thinks is shocking, since even she can’t stand the Russians. Mabel and Jaelle trade her copy of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ back and forth, writing in the margins, and the book will never be the same, but Elise can’t find it in herself to care. Georgiana spends most of her days in Elise’s office, sipping tea and not saying much, but then, not much needs to be said.

“Smart is cool,” she tells Chelsea at the competition.

Chelsea looks at her with hope.

She hasn’t just found one; she’s found many. They approach her tentatively, with sneers and rolled eyes, but they approach her. They steal her books, but at least it’s books they’re stealing. Maybe they’re using their smarts for crime, but at least they’re using their smarts. It’s more than she could say at their age. 

There is nothing wrong with being a miner or a construction worker, she knows. She gets viciously angry whenever someone implies that there is. But she wanted options she never thought she had, and she wants those girls to know that. Chelsea looks at her with hope, and hope was all she ever wanted to give. Too many St. Trinian’s girls were sent to St. Trinian’s because their family had no hope for them, but now she can see them reading, and thinking, and maybe questioning what they’ve been told about themselves all their lives.

But she still needs to go. Not because of them, but because of her. She promised herself she would get out, and this is too close to what she left behind.

When she leaves, there are no tears from the students. The teachers don’t drink to her future. There is no pomp and circumstance; there is nothing but shrugs and a marked silence. She packs her room up, tucking the last of her books into a trunk, and walks out of the school. Unscathed, this time, no traps waiting for her, which she supposes is compliment enough.

She gets a letter a week later. All it says is _thank you_ from twenty-two different people, all unsigned, but she spent a year grading their papers, she knows their handwriting.

It’s the best gift she’s ever gotten.

(The best one she ever gave herself? _She got out._ )


End file.
